If you define history as a written record of the past, then it’s easy to be precise about when history began in central Colorado: exactly 228 years ago, when Juan Bautista de Anza, governor and military commander of the Spanish province of New Mexico, led an army north from Santa Fe.

In August 1779, Anza took a roundabout course to defeat the Jupe Comanche and especially their chief, Cuerno Verde. The warrior’s name is “Green Horn” in English, and he got it by wearing a head-dress with a buffalo horn painted green. Greenhorn Mountain, the highest of the Wet Mountains southwest of Pueblo at 12,346 feet, commemorates him, rather than some “green-horn tenderfoot” or the like.

The Comanche generally lived on the southern Great Plains, but often they crossed the Sangre de Cristo mountains to raid Taos and nearby settlements for women and horses. The Spanish colonial government had promised to protect the farmers, the Pueblos and the neighboring Utes from Comanche raiders, but had failed. The Comanche threatened to push the Spanish back to El Paso.

So when Anza arrived at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe in late 1778, he had his work cut out for him. He was already a distinguished frontier commander; among his other accomplishments, he established the Presidio of San Francisco in California in 1776.

As Patty Limerick of the University of Colorado once observed, one sure path to historical obscurity in this country is to do something on the West Coast in 1776, because for some reason, the attentions of American historians are focused elsewhere for that year.

Previous Spanish commanders in Santa Fe had pursued the Comanche after their raids. The pursuit was futile, and it did not discourage further incursions. Anza took a different course. When he learned from scouts that the Comanche were coming, he improved defenses at the villages, assembled an army of 800 men and 2,400 horses, and headed north up the Rio Grande into the San Luis Valley (which he probably named).

They often moved at night so Comanche scouts would not see their cloud of dust. He camped near Saguache, where some Utes joined the campaign – the word “Comanche” means something like “people who fight us” in Ute – then near Villa Grove, and on over Poncha Pass. They forded the Arkansas River near Salida, proceeded east along the south edge of South Park, and emerged on the Great Plains near Pikes Peak. Under Greenhorn Mountain, Anza’s forces defeated Cuerno Verde’s on Sept. 3, 1779, which led to peace between the Spanish and the Comanche.

His campaign journal is the first written account of the northern San Luis Valley, Poncha Pass, and the upper Arkansas valley; in other words, the start of history hereabouts. We celebrate it annually with Anza Day where he camped in Poncha Springs. It’s a rather low-key event that lasts about two hours – a potluck in Chipeta Park, followed by a presentation.

The speaker is generally a historian or history buff. We’ve heard from revisionist historians like Patty Limerick, environmental historians like Tom Wolfe, regional historians like Phil Carson and Ron Kessler, and Anza biographer Don Garate. But Anza’s expedition was, after all, a military campaign, and we’ve never heard from a military historian.

An article in the National Review last fall bemoaned the decline of military history classes and programs in American universities. Author John J. Miller complained that modern academia focuses on gender relations and social status, just about any perspective except how battles are fought and won or lost.

So I began to despair that we’d ever hear a military analysis of Anza’s campaign, until it dawned on me that we have a military academy in Colorado, and the U.S. Air Force Academy is one school that must teach military history, doubtless even covering the years before the airplane was invented.

Some inquiries put me in touch with Lt. Col. Christopher Rein, who teaches American military history there, and he agreed to come talk to us about Anza’s 1779 Comanche campaign from a military perspective: How did Anza organize his forces to defeat the Comanche after his predecessors had so frequently failed?

It should be an interesting evening for history buffs, and it’s free and open to the public. Visit Poncha Springs at 6 p.m. Friday for the potluck in the town park, followed at 7 p.m. by the presentation in the town hall across the street.

Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.